Aihearkisto: In English

On March 8, 2016, on the occasion of International Women’s Day, I was asked to give a speech about safety at a public demonstration in Turku. The event was organized by individual activists together with KJAR (the System of Free Women Society of East Kurdistan). The theme was Take Back the Night, which has been a rallying point for different feminist demonstrations in Turku during the last three years. In 2016, the theme Take Back the Night was motivated by a desire to reclaim public space from fascist and nationalist groups that had roamed in public spaces in the city at night. They claim that their motive is to protect Finnish white women who are under threat of rape and physical violence by migrant men. These groups have practiced violence and hatred towards women, racialized people, trans* people and other marginalized groups. Like in all nationalist projects, women’s bodies are being used as arguments for racist values. Lue loppuun →

Since the elections on November 9th that resulted in Donald Trump being chosen as the next President of the US, various explanations have been presented by commentators in newspapers, TV and social media. Many of them, at least in Finland, seem to centre on the role of the white working-class and discuss how people in areas that suffer from large scale industrial decline wanted political change. However, this is a very narrow and to some extent misleading analysis of the complex problematics leading to the victory of Trump Lue loppuun →

“Hello I am Amin, a researcher at the University of Helsinki working on the issue of antiracism education in Finland.” This is how I often introduce myself to people only to observe a quiet exclamation and a smug smile. I often wonder if this is because of who I am or what I am doing or if it is just my accent. In March 2015, a journalist working for YLE news helped me understand the reason for my interlocutors’ reactions when she followed her smile with the question “Oh is there such a thing (as antiracism education) in Finland?” Lue loppuun →

What are the central questions for antiracism today and what kinds of strategies do activists and researchers use in their struggles towards an antiracist future? What is critical antiracist activism and how are understandings of it related to our intersecting positionalities? These are some of the questions that were addressed by activists and researchers in a panel discussion, organised by Raster network, at the Antiracist Forum. Lue loppuun →

I remember clearly the first time I was profiled by the police in Helsinki. It was the evening rush hour in the city and I had just made my way down the crowded escalator that leads to the underground metro platform in Hakaniemi, just two stops from the city center. As I got off the escalators, a metro was blaring out alarms, signaling it was about to depart. I quickened my steps, half running, half walking, determined to get on it. I rushed forward, hoping to beat the soon closing metro doors. A few paces off the doors, I was stopped by two individuals. They literally jumped in front of me, forcing me to stop abruptly to avoid colliding into them. Lue loppuun →

Every now and then, I get into an argument online about racism. I should know better. But once I did it on a larger scale, as a project, when I cooperated with The Guardian on a series called Racism in the Digital Age. The series developed from an editorial concern with the sheer level of abuse aimed at writers of colour ‘below the line’. But while abuse could be moderated, there was also sense that whenever a writer of minority background wrote in any way about their experience, or with a lens trained on the racial dimension of social and political issues, they were frequently greeted with hostility, hostility expressed in the refrain, ‘why are you bringing race into it?’ The first wave of articles in the series, then, was to examine changing understandings of racism in the UK, and also to invite writers who had experienced this abuse or latent hostility to write about their experience of writing about race and racism in an interactive media environment. Lue loppuun →